2 killed, 1 critically injured in domestic violence shooting

New task force leads to big narcotics bust in Brown Summit, sheriff's office says

Yahoo

17 hours ago

Yahoo

New task force leads to big narcotics bust in Brown Summit, sheriff's office says

GUILFORD COUNTY, N.C. (WGHP) — A Guilford County man has been charged with 12 felonies related to drug trafficking here in the Triad. Micheal Blake Turner, 39, was arrested after the newly formed Guilford County Narcotics Task Force executed search warrants in Brown Summit and what they found was massive: 36 kilograms of cocaine, 44,000 grams of marijuana, 91 grams of ecstasy, 1700 grams of fentanyl, 16 firearms (4 of them reported stolen) and a large amount of cash. 'It is really a drop in the bucket of what this task force has accomplished over the last 5 months,' said Chief John Thompson from the Greensboro Police Department. The Greensboro Police Department teamed up with the Guilford County Sheriff's Office and state agencies to get more drugs off the streets. 'Specifically targeting those involved in the manufacture, sale and distribution of illegal narcotics in the triad,' said Sheriff Danny Rogers from the Guilford County Sheriff's Office. The task force officially launched 2 weeks ago, but has been working together for several months. Since January, they've taken more than one thousand pounds of drugs. In total, 657 pounds of cocaine, 444 pounds of marijuana, 32 pounds of meth, 22 pounds of fentanyl and heroin, one pound of ecstasy pills, 102 guns and more than $1 million in cash have been seized. 'In Greensboro, Guilford County, we are seeing a 13 percent reduction in our violent crime, it is a direct correlation to these seizures the task force is making and the weapons they are taking off the street,' Chief Thompson said. Chief Thompson also said overdose deaths are down 37 percent in the city. 'It is about protecting lives, it's about restoring safety in our neighborhoods and holding the most dangerous offenders accountable,' Chief Thompson said. Turner was charged with the following in connection to the bust: Two counts of felony trafficking fentanyl Two counts of felony trafficking cocaine Two counts of felony trafficking marijuana Teo counts of felony trafficking MDMA Felony possession of a stolen firearm Felony possession of a firearm by a convicted felon Felony maintaining a dwelling/vehicle for controlled substances Turner is currently being held in the Guilford County jail on a $3 million bond. He is expected back in court next month. Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

A Bizarre PTSD Therapy ‘Seemed Too Good to Be True'

Atlantic

a day ago

Atlantic

A Bizarre PTSD Therapy ‘Seemed Too Good to Be True'

The morning of April 28, 2004, started like the rest of Jeff Turner's mornings in Iraq. Breakfast in the chow hall, a walk across the grounds to his station. The same sun, the same palm trees, the same desert. But the two distant thumps Turner heard as he left the hall were unusual. Boy, that sounds like mortars, he thought. The hall exploded first. Shards of its metal frame shot into his flesh. The second bomb erupted in the sand nearby, encircling him in smoke. Turner dove between two parked mail vans. There, he began to register the screams from the chow hall. A soldier who had been chasing Turner down found him soaked in blood. 'You've got a problem, sergeant,' the soldier told him. The mortar had ripped through the hall's canvas roof and sprayed shrapnel in every direction. Compared to others, Turner was lucky. He walked away from the attack with wounds deep in his leg and under the wristband of his watch. The next day, he was back at work. But he knew something was off. He soon found his heart pounding throughout mundane tasks. Loud noises sent him leaping into bunkers. What little sleep he got was plagued with nightmares; waking launched him into a state of panic. Some of these symptoms persisted for years. A decade after the explosion, the flashbacks began. Vivid memories of war would flood his vision, freezing him in place. He didn't know what was happening at first, but he eventually noticed certain triggers: the bang of a dump truck, the scent of wet canvas. 'It would bring me back, just like that,' Turner told me. 'I would be stuck.' Flashbacks, along with nightmares, sleeplessness, and a heightened sense of fear, are hallmark symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder. Without treatment, some people with PTSD begin to notice distortions in their behavior and mood. They feel like they are in constant danger, because the past keeps barging in on the present. The fear makes them avoidant, and they withdraw into isolation. Shame, guilt, and anger fester; depression and a dramatically higher risk of suicide can follow. Turner received his diagnosis when his tour ended in 2005. At home, he snapped at his wife and kids. He kept misplacing his keys and losing his hat. Rage consumed him at all times, except when he was drunk. 'I was a completely different person,' he said. Treating PTSD revolves around a central question: How do you get a person to leave the past in the past? Researchers work on ways to distance patients from the intense feelings a recollection of a traumatic moment can evoke. Since PTSD was first recognized by the medical field more than 40 years ago, the prevailing psychotherapeutic treatment has entailed facing the trauma head-on. In prolonged-exposure therapy, patients revisit their trauma in weekly sessions with therapists in the hope that repetition will extinguish their fears. The idea is, essentially, to face your demons, to look terror in the eye. And it works. Prolonged exposure, which has been extensively studied and is endorsed by the National Center for PTSD, the leading PTSD-research center housed in the Department of Veterans Affairs, has been found to help nearly 70 percent of patients who complete treatment. The past recedes; life can move forward again. The problem with prolonged exposure, however, is that it can be incredibly hard to get through. Charging right toward trauma invites immense pain. It can be so harrowing that people drop out of treatment. Fewer than half of patients actually complete it, according to the largest-ever study of psychotherapy treatment for PTSD in veterans. PTSD is more common among veterans than civilians. It's also deadlier. Among people with current or past diagnoses, the risk of death by suicide for veterans is roughly double that of civilians. The urgency of the situation has led researchers to develop alternative therapies for PTSD: medications, new forms of talk therapy, regimens involving virtual reality, and, most controversially, psychedelics. After years rotating through a jumble of medications and therapies with limited effects, in 2023, Turner took an even less conventional route. He landed on a little-known treatment called Reconsolidation of Traumatic Memories. RTM comes with a big, perhaps even fantastical claim: that treating PTSD can be painless. Turner was skeptical but figured he had nothing to lose. To his surprise, the treatment seemed to be the only thing that worked. After just five sessions, he told me, his flashbacks disappeared. 'It was the weirdest thing,' he said. 'When I did it, it was done.' The treatment, he told me, was 'a bit of a miracle.' With an unorthodox approach and apparently dramatic results, RTM invites—and demands—scrutiny. Many researchers look at it suspiciously, if they've heard about it at all. Most I spoke with for this article hadn't. Michael Roy, a retired Army colonel who has spent decades researching PTSD, is the exception. In 2017, RTM proponents presented anecdotes of the treatment's purportedly miraculous effects at the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences in Bethesda, Maryland, where Roy is a professor of medicine. He listened dubiously. 'At first, I was kind of skeptical of the whole thing,' he told me. But after he conferred with a colleague, his doubt gave way to curiosity. RTM might be worth researching, he thought, if it could be studied in a rigorous way. The treatment intrigued Roy because it attempts a softer, gentler way of confronting past trauma. If prolonged exposure plunges headfirst into a painful memory, RTM dips a toe in, testing the waters. Instead of talking openly about a difficult memory, RTM patients reimagine their trauma through a series of specific mental exercises meant to fade its emotional charge. Like other types of psychotherapy, RTM uses movies as a metaphor for replaying a traumatic memory. But where RTM differs is the extreme—even comical—regimentation it employs to achieve its desired effect. The therapy follows a manualized 89-step protocol. First, you're asked to imagine yourself seated in a movie theater that you associate with happy memories, taking in the sensory details: the scent of popcorn, the plush seats. Next, you detach from your body—floating up, then backward toward the projection booth. Suddenly, you become the projectionist and hit 'Play.' As a minute-long, black-and-white clip of your trauma rolls, you watch your seated self watching the screen. Meanwhile, the therapist observes your reactions. The subtlest flicker—a shift in posture, a clenched jaw—prompts the therapist to bring you back to the present, redirecting your attention, say, by asking you to spell your name backwards. Once you've calmed down, you return to the theater. Only this time, you're told to tweak the film in any way that makes it easier to watch: You might change the camera angle, move the screen back 20 feet, or replace everyone with stick figures. You replay the clip in your mind. If it's still distressing, you adjust it again and again, until you can repeatedly 'watch' it from start to finish without reacting. The point is to make the trauma mundane. Ideally, the experience leaves you bored. When you can consistently watch the clip without reacting, the second phase of RTM begins. You return to the theater, but this time you walk up to the movie screen and step inside the film's final frame. Now the scene is in vivid color and detail. The therapist tells you to let the memory play out backwards, as if being rapidly rewound. The whole scene whizzes by in about two seconds. This, too, you must learn to withstand without reacting. Then the final phase, 'rescripting,' begins. The therapist asks you to invent an alternate version of the memory in which the trauma never happens, and to tell that story aloud. In this timeline, anything goes: A person who was sexually assaulted in their dorm might imagine that they left for a party instead, or that the window opened and a unicorn took them out of the room. Doing so should be easy, even fun, for patients, according to Roy. Sometimes, he told me, 'they're smiling; they're laughing.' The approach is based on a theory of how memories can be reworked. Reconsolidation—the R in RTM —is a neurological process in which a long-term memory is retrieved, altered, then stored in its new form, like a digital document that is edited and saved. Reconsolidation is thought to alter the physical structure of a memory itself in a person's brain, though the exact mechanics of how this would happen remain hypothetical. RTM's bizarre sequence of steps is supposed to be a means to control the process: The idea is not to trick the person into thinking they never experienced trauma, but rather to soften the intense emotions attached to the memory. Critics of RTM point out that reconsolidation isn't as well established as the paradigms that other PTSD treatments are based on. Extinction, the foundation of prolonged exposure, was famously demonstrated by the Russian scientist Ivan Pavlov nearly a century ago: He conditioned dogs to salivate at the sound of a metronome—and then gradually taught them to unlearn the response by no longer giving them food after each tick. But RTM's proponents argue: Why not try something new? The dearth of palatable treatment options means that many people are not addressing their trauma at all. Besides the relative ease for patients, they say, RTM offers other benefits over more common treatments: It's quick, usually lasting no more than four 90-minute sessions. And because it doesn't involve directly probing a person's worst memories, administering treatment is less excruciating for therapists, too. RTM was created two decades ago by Frank Bourke, a clinical and research psychologist. Bourke positions himself as an academic underdog whose scientific contributions have been unjustly overlooked. After getting his Ph.D. in psychology, he lectured briefly at Cornell University before starting his own clinical practice, where he created the prototype for RTM. Its basis, he told me, is neurolinguistic programming, or NLP, a 1970s-era idea bridging cognition, language, and behavior that has widely been dismissed as pseudoscience. He developed an NLP-based treatment that he says helped 400 or so people who had experienced the horror of the September 11 attacks. This treatment evolved into RTM. In his own research on the therapy, he reports that a mind-boggling 90 percent of PTSD patients saw improvements in their condition. He currently leads the Research and Recognition Project, a nonprofit that promotes the use of RTM. Last fall, I spoke with Bourke over a video call from his home in upstate New York. For someone in his 80s, he is unexpectedly forceful, like a cable-TV pastor. He fumed about the treatment not being more widely used. Given the staggering suicide rate among veterans, he said, 'how the hell can I not get this thing into play?' Right now, RTM's most prominent supporters are not scientists. They include the cartoonist Garry Trudeau—who has praised RTM in his long-running comic strip Doonesbury, which often focuses on veterans issues—and Montel Williams, the talk-show host and retired naval officer. Researchers acquainted with RTM, meanwhile, are largely skeptical of it. Only one clinical trial on RTM has been published independently of Bourke's group, and its lead author, based in the United Kingdom, declined to speak with me for this story. Four small clinical trials by Bourke and his team, though published in peer-reviewed journals, weren't done particularly well. They compared RTM patients only with people who received no treatment at all—that any form of treatment would be better than nothing is unsurprising. In this context, even a 90 percent improvement doesn't mean much. Elizabeth Hembree, a prolonged-exposure expert at the University of Pennsylvania, told me that further research on RTM would be worthwhile, 'but in trials that are actually, you know, good.' The methodology raises suspicions about RTM in general. It seems like it's 'going to work like magic, and that gets my hackles up,' Andrew Cooper, a psychiatry professor at the University of Toronto at Scarborough, told me. Even Roy felt similarly when he first heard about it. 'It sort of seemed too good to be true,' he told me. When I asked Bourke over email about the criticisms of his studies, he said they were done 'in order to attract the interest, support and funding from prestigious university laboratories and researchers.' Bourke maintains ties to Roy, who has sought to give RTM the more rigorous scientific shakeout it needs. In 2019, Roy began the first large-scale clinical trial of RTM, investigating its effectiveness compared with prolonged exposure. He completed it last year. His early data, which he has presented at conferences but aren't published yet, make a compelling case for RTM. In every metric measured, RTM modestly outperformed its competitor: 89 percent of patients completed RTM, compared with a 73 percent completion rate for prolonged exposure; after treatment, nearly 70 percent of RTM patients no longer met the criteria for a PTSD diagnosis, compared with 61 percent of prolonged-exposure patients. RTM treatment required an average of 8.2 sessions versus 8.9, and afterward patients scored lower than prolonged-exposure patients on the PCL-5, a standard measure of PTSD severity. Roy's results aren't nearly as eye-popping as those from Bourke's studies. But they are still impressive. And they carry much more weight. His study comprises more than 100 active or former service members, and unlike the previous studies, it compares RTM head-to-head with an active competitor—'a good step,' Hembree told me. Given Roy's affiliation with the Army and federal funding for his work, Roy's study, which he hopes to publish within a year, may be what it takes to propel RTM into academic relevance. Last fall, I traveled to Boston to line up early outside a Marriott meeting room, hoping to snag a seat in what I assumed would be a packed house. Roy was presenting his completed findings on RTM at the annual International Society for Traumatic Stress Studies conference, the largest gathering of researchers in the field. In 2022, the last time he spoke about RTM to this crowd, the preliminary results from his then-ongoing study were so positive that they caused an uproar from skeptics. Now Roy was back, and I was sure that the crowd would return for more drama. Only they didn't. A sparse crowd listened politely as Roy, who is in his early 60s, took the podium at the end of a fluorescently lit room. His graying curls were offset by his boyish demeanor. With a click, he pulled up his first slide. It featured a quote from the Argentine writer José Narosky: 'In war, there are no unwounded soldiers.' Another slide referenced the study showing that fewer than half of patients complete prolonged-exposure therapy. 'That sucks,' Roy said. Taking on an intervention as unorthodox as RTM risks damaging Roy's academic reputation. But it could also crown his decades-long career in PTSD research. While he was an internal-medicine resident at Walter Reed in the early '90s, war broke out in the Middle East. 'I saw hundreds and hundreds of Gulf War veterans, and it was fairly obvious that PTSD was a huge issue,' Roy told me. The treatment programs he developed incorporated many types of therapy—psychiatric, physical, recreational, art—and are still used at Walter Reed today. But they're far too labor-intensive to scale. 'If we could do that for everybody, that'd be great. But, obviously, that's not too realistic,' Roy said. In his view, to treat the growing number of veterans with PTSD, the standard treatments must evolve. In some ways, RTM is a radical departure from those treatments. Prolonged exposure is based on weakening the link between memories and emotions through the phenomenon of extinction, not actively changing them. Psychologists initially believed that a memory was like wet cement: malleable until it became permanently set, or 'consolidated,' David Riccio, a professor emeritus of psychology at Kent State University, told me. But in the late '60s, researchers showed in animals that old memories could be altered and then stored away in their updated form. Hence, reconsolidation. Reactivating a difficult memory—loosening the cement, so to speak—requires just a fleeting recollection. Because RTM is supposed to work quickly, patients can address multiple traumas during treatment—an important factor for veterans, whose traumas tend to stack up. A therapist in Roy's study told me that RTM patients addressed up to four traumas in 10 sessions. If the data bear out RTM's effects, 'it could end up surpassing those others that are first-line treatments now,' Roy said. That remains a big if. RTM is still novel enough that it could go nowhere. Promising trials are shelved all the time, sometimes for reasons beyond their results. And the Trump administration's massive funding cuts to a Department of Defense–led research-grants program will undoubtedly hamper PTSD research more broadly. Cost, logistics, and financial interests can doom research. So can ideological differences. The basic goal of RTM—remedying PTSD without the pain—conflicts with the prevailing paradigm of trauma treatment. When a person is afraid of elevators, they 'understand implicitly that I need to get into an elevator at some point to get over this,' Barbara Rothbaum, a psychiatry professor at Emory University who has researched prolonged exposure for decades, told me. In this view, RTM is ineffective at best, and, at worst, it's cheating, like merely peeking at the elevator from around a corner down the hall. Recalling a trauma, but backing off before becoming too emotional, could be seen by some exposure experts as avoidance, Hembree said—the very thing that keeps people with PTSD stuck in the past. After a subdued question-and-answer period in the Marriott conference room, the symposium faded to an end. A few attendees milled around outside the room, looking bemused. Birgit Kleim, a scientist from the University of Zurich who studies reconsolidation, laughed when I asked her thoughts on RTM. The data are so good that I 'don't believe it,' she said. Later, she shared a sentiment that is so often meant to strengthen emerging science but can also thwart it: It's promising, but more research is needed. Over sushi in Boston, Roy told me about his history of pursuing unconventional research. Not all of it worked out. A previous idea he studied —treating brain injury with music composed from patients' own brain waves—turned out to be 'garbage,' he said. Research is always a gamble. A fringe idea with real potential could turn out to be groundbreaking, but chances are, it'll be a dud. Roy shrugged: That's just how science goes. The next morning, as I waited in a dark ballroom for one of the keynote addresses of the conference to begin, hundreds of researchers had turned out to hear a discussion on using psychedelics to treat PTSD, itself uncharted territory. Spotlights on an elevated stage illuminated six leaders of PTSD research, imposing against a royal-blue backdrop. Among them was Paula Schnurr, who is widely regarded as the most influential person in the field. Psychedelics were promising because research on new PTSD treatments has 'hit a wall,' Schnurr said. Yet even psychedelics are still combined with old therapies such as prolonged exposure, noted another panelist, Amy Lehrner. 'Are we about developing and studying new options for veterans? Or are we about closing down inquiry and just sticking with what we already have?' Lehrner said. Consider the ' PTSD Clinical Practice Guideline,' a document produced jointly by the Defense Department and the VA that profoundly shapes treatment and research. The most recent version, released in 2023, recommends just three therapies, down from seven in previous iterations. These three options are sometimes disparagingly referred to as 'the trinity': In addition to prolonged exposure, they include cognitive processing therapy and eye-movement desensitization and processing, which are newer treatments. Over the past decade, a number of researchers have denounced the field's reliance on these approaches. RTM's chances of finding a foothold in this landscape are slim. Prolonged exposure was one of the first therapy treatments for PTSD. As such, it is both well studied and widely used despite its drawbacks, Maria Steenkamp, an NYU psychiatry professor who has critiqued the dominance of prolonged exposure, told me. The narrative that it is the best treatment 'took on a life of its own over time,' Steenkamp said. This story has dramatically influenced the field. Most funding for research on new treatments comes from the Department of Defense and the VA, which is currently bracing for the Trump administration to cut more than 80,000 jobs. Under normal circumstances, the VA awards funding on the basis of several factors, including plausibility, preliminary evidence, a sound investigation plan, and the researcher's track record. As a result, well-established treatments have continued to be studied and refined over time. 'The folks who were best positioned to compete for funding were individuals who already had a track record of conducting clinical trials in PE and CBT,' Charles Hoge, a senior scientist at the office of the Army Surgeon General who has criticized the recent 'Clinical Practice Guideline,' told me. As a result, 'relatively small amounts of funding are going into novel treatment approaches.' The field, it seems, is not so much stuck but looped into an ouroboros. Everyone I spoke with told me that Schnurr was the person to ask about the future of new treatments. I was warned that she would be difficult to get an audience with. As the executive director of the National Center for PTSD, she oversees the Clinical Practice Guideline. She ran the study indicating prolonged exposure's 55.8 percent dropout rate that is so often cited by its critics—the finding that Roy said 'sucks.' After weeks of emailing with the VA's press officers, I finally got through to her. She defended prolonged exposure by explaining that even patients who drop out of treatment still reap some of its benefits, and that condensing sessions into a shorter time frame—weeks rather than months—significantly reduces the dropout rate. The VA is constantly seeking new treatments, but it only backs those with a solid evidence base, she said. That's why the list of recommended treatments has been pared down. How might a little-studied but promising therapy such as RTM get the VA's attention? Schnurr's answer was as I expected: More research is needed, preferably not by the treatment developer. If you're a scientist pitching new research to the VA, you have to 'make a good case as to why you think a particular treatment should work, and provide preliminary evidence if you have it,' Miriam Smyth, a director in the VA's research office, told me. Other than Bourke, the only scientists who have studied RTM are Roy and the British group that declined to speak with me; most haven't looked into it. 'My guess would be that they find that other treatments look more promising,' Schnurr said. RTM's fiercest advocates argue that no one with PTSD has time to wait around. Whether or not RTM truly is the treatment they've dreamed of, they're correct about the urgency. After Turner, the Iraq veteran, tried RTM, his flashbacks vanished, but the anger that has coursed through him for two decades has never abated, he told me. Near the end of our interview, his brusque exterior cracked. Through sobs, he said that nobody but a veteran could understand how it feels. He has largely been able to move on from his past, but the damage it caused is always present, walling him off from the rest of the world. 'I just don't think or feel the same,' Turner said. 'And I feel that everywhere.'

The PTSD Treatment That Veterans Dream Of

Atlantic

a day ago

Atlantic

The PTSD Treatment That Veterans Dream Of

The morning of April 28, 2004, started like the rest of Jeff Turner's mornings in Iraq. Breakfast in the chow hall, a walk across the grounds to his station. The same sun, the same palm trees, the same desert. But the two distant thumps Turner heard as he left the hall were unusual. Boy, that sounds like mortars, he thought. The hall exploded first. Shards of its metal frame shot into his flesh. The second bomb erupted in the sand nearby, encircling him in smoke. Turner dove between two parked mail vans. There, he began to register the screams from the chow hall. A soldier who had been chasing Turner down found him soaked in blood. 'You've got a problem, sergeant,' the soldier told him. The mortar had ripped through the hall's canvas roof and sprayed shrapnel in every direction. Compared to others, Turner was lucky. He walked away from the attack with wounds deep in his leg and under the wristband of his watch. The next day, he was back at work. But he knew something was off. He soon found his heart pounding throughout mundane tasks. Loud noises sent him leaping into bunkers. What little sleep he got was plagued with nightmares; waking launched him into a state of panic. Some of these symptoms persisted for years. A decade after the explosion, the flashbacks began. Vivid memories of war would flood his vision, freezing him in place. He didn't know what was happening at first, but he eventually noticed certain triggers: the bang of a dump truck, the scent of wet canvas. 'It would bring me back, just like that,' Turner told me. 'I would be stuck.' Flashbacks, along with nightmares, sleeplessness, and a heightened sense of fear, are hallmark symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder. Without treatment, some people with PTSD begin to notice distortions in their behavior and mood. They feel like they are in constant danger, because the past keeps barging in on the present. The fear makes them avoidant, and they withdraw into isolation. Shame, guilt, and anger fester; depression and a dramatically higher risk of suicide can follow. Turner received his diagnosis when his tour ended in 2005. At home, he snapped at his wife and kids. He kept misplacing his keys and losing his hat. Rage consumed him at all times, except when he was drunk. 'I was a completely different person,' he said. Treating PTSD revolves around a central question: How do you get a person to leave the past in the past? Researchers work on ways to distance patients from the intense feelings a recollection of a traumatic moment can evoke. Since PTSD was first recognized by the medical field more than 40 years ago, the prevailing psychotherapeutic treatment has entailed facing the trauma head-on. In prolonged-exposure therapy, patients revisit their trauma in weekly sessions with therapists in the hope that repetition will extinguish their fears. The idea is, essentially, to face your demons, to look terror in the eye. And it works. Prolonged exposure, which has been extensively studied and is endorsed by the National Center for PTSD, the leading PTSD-research center housed in the Department of Veterans Affairs, has been found to help nearly 70 percent of patients who complete treatment. The past recedes; life can move forward again. The problem with prolonged exposure, however, is that it can be incredibly hard to get through. Charging right toward trauma invites immense pain. It can be so harrowing that people drop out of treatment. Fewer than half of patients actually complete it, according to the largest-ever study of psychotherapy treatment for PTSD in veterans. PTSD is more common among veterans than civilians. It's also deadlier. Among people with current or past diagnoses, the risk of death by suicide for veterans is roughly double that of civilians. The urgency of the situation has led researchers to develop alternative therapies for PTSD: medications, new forms of talk therapy, regimens involving virtual reality, and, most controversially, psychedelics. After years rotating through a jumble of medications and therapies with limited effects, in 2023, Turner took an even less conventional route. He landed on a little-known treatment called Reconsolidation of Traumatic Memories. RTM comes with a big, perhaps even fantastical claim: that treating PTSD can be painless. Turner was skeptical but figured he had nothing to lose. To his surprise, the treatment seemed to be the only thing that worked. After just five sessions, he told me, his flashbacks disappeared. 'It was the weirdest thing,' he said. 'When I did it, it was done.' The treatment, he told me, was 'a bit of a miracle.' With an unorthodox approach and apparently dramatic results, RTM invites—and demands—scrutiny. Many researchers look at it suspiciously, if they've heard about it at all. Most I spoke with for this article hadn't. Michael Roy, a retired Army colonel who has spent decades researching PTSD, is the exception. In 2017, RTM proponents presented anecdotes of the treatment's purportedly miraculous effects at the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences in Bethesda, Maryland, where Roy is a professor of medicine. He listened dubiously. 'At first, I was kind of skeptical of the whole thing,' he told me. But after he conferred with a colleague, his doubt gave way to curiosity. RTM might be worth researching, he thought, if it could be studied in a rigorous way. The treatment intrigued Roy because it attempts a softer, gentler way of confronting past trauma. If prolonged exposure plunges headfirst into a painful memory, RTM dips a toe in, testing the waters. Instead of talking openly about a difficult memory, RTM patients reimagine their trauma through a series of specific mental exercises meant to fade its emotional charge. Like other types of psychotherapy, RTM uses movies as a metaphor for replaying a traumatic memory. But where RTM differs is the extreme—even comical—regimentation it employs to achieve its desired effect. The therapy follows a manualized 89-step protocol. First, you're asked to imagine yourself seated in a movie theater that you associate with happy memories, taking in the sensory details: the scent of popcorn, the plush seats. Next, you detach from your body—floating up, then backward toward the projection booth. Suddenly, you become the projectionist and hit 'Play.' As a minute-long, black-and-white clip of your trauma rolls, you watch your seated self watching the screen. Meanwhile, the therapist observes your reactions. The subtlest flicker—a shift in posture, a clenched jaw—prompts the therapist to bring you back to the present, redirecting your attention, say, by asking you to spell your name backwards. Once you've calmed down, you return to the theater. Only this time, you're told to tweak the film in any way that makes it easier to watch: You might change the camera angle, move the screen back 20 feet, or replace everyone with stick figures. You replay the clip in your mind. If it's still distressing, you adjust it again and again, until you can repeatedly 'watch' it from start to finish without reacting. The point is to make the trauma mundane. Ideally, the experience leaves you bored. When you can consistently watch the clip without reacting, the second phase of RTM begins. You return to the theater, but this time you walk up to the movie screen and step inside the film's final frame. Now the scene is in vivid color and detail. The therapist tells you to let the memory play out backwards, as if being rapidly rewound. The whole scene whizzes by in about two seconds. This, too, you must learn to withstand without reacting. Then the final phase, 'rescripting,' begins. The therapist asks you to invent an alternate version of the memory in which the trauma never happens, and to tell that story aloud. In this timeline, anything goes: A person who was sexually assaulted in their dorm might imagine that they left for a party instead, or that the window opened and a unicorn took them out of the room. Doing so should be easy, even fun, for patients, according to Roy. Sometimes, he told me, 'they're smiling; they're laughing.' The approach is based on a theory of how memories can be reworked. Reconsolidation—the R in RTM —is a neurological process in which a long-term memory is retrieved, altered, then stored in its new form, like a digital document that is edited and saved. Reconsolidation is thought to alter the physical structure of a memory itself in a person's brain, though the exact mechanics of how this would happen remain hypothetical. RTM's bizarre sequence of steps is supposed to be a means to control the process: The idea is not to trick the person into thinking they never experienced trauma, but rather to soften the intense emotions attached to the memory. Critics of RTM point out that reconsolidation isn't as well established as the paradigms that other PTSD treatments are based on. Extinction, the foundation of prolonged exposure, was famously demonstrated by the Russian scientist Ivan Pavlov nearly a century ago: He conditioned dogs to salivate at the sound of a metronome—and then gradually taught them to unlearn the response by no longer giving them food after each tick. But RTM's proponents argue: Why not try something new? The dearth of palatable treatment options means that many people are not addressing their trauma at all. Besides the relative ease for patients, they say, RTM offers other benefits over more common treatments: It's quick, usually lasting no more than four 90-minute sessions. And because it doesn't involve directly probing a person's worst memories, administering treatment is less excruciating for therapists, too. RTM was created two decades ago by Frank Bourke, a clinical and research psychologist. Bourke positions himself as an academic underdog whose scientific contributions have been unjustly overlooked. After getting his Ph.D. in psychology, he lectured briefly at Cornell University before starting his own clinical practice, where he created the prototype for RTM. Its basis, he told me, is neurolinguistic programming, or NLP, a 1970s-era idea bridging cognition, language, and behavior that has widely been dismissed as pseudoscience. He developed an NLP-based treatment that he says helped 400 or so people who had experienced the horror of the September 11 attacks. This treatment evolved into RTM. In his own research on the therapy, he reports that a mind-boggling 90 percent of PTSD patients saw improvements in their condition. He currently leads the Research and Recognition Project, a nonprofit that promotes the use of RTM. Last fall, I spoke with Bourke over a video call from his home in upstate New York. For someone in his 80s, he is unexpectedly forceful, like a cable-TV pastor. He fumed about the treatment not being more widely used. Given the staggering suicide rate among veterans, he said, 'how the hell can I not get this thing into play?' Right now, RTM's most prominent supporters are not scientists. They include the cartoonist Garry Trudeau—who has praised RTM in his long-running comic strip Doonesbury, which often focuses on veterans issues—and Montel Williams, the talk-show host and retired naval officer. Researchers acquainted with RTM, meanwhile, are largely skeptical of it. Only one clinical trial on RTM has been published independently of Bourke's group, and its lead author, based in the United Kingdom, declined to speak with me for this story. Four small clinical trials by Bourke and his team, though published in peer-reviewed journals, weren't done particularly well. They compared RTM patients only with people who received no treatment at all—that any form of treatment would be better than nothing is unsurprising. In this context, even a 90 percent improvement doesn't mean much. Elizabeth Hembree, a prolonged-exposure expert at the University of Pennsylvania, told me that further research on RTM would be worthwhile, 'but in trials that are actually, you know, good.' The methodology raises suspicions about RTM in general. It seems like it's 'going to work like magic, and that gets my hackles up,' Andrew Cooper, a psychiatry professor at the University of Toronto at Scarborough, told me. Even Roy felt similarly when he first heard about it. 'It sort of seemed too good to be true,' he told me. When I asked Bourke over email about the criticisms of his studies, he said they were done 'in order to attract the interest, support and funding from prestigious university laboratories and researchers.' Bourke maintains ties to Roy, who has sought to give RTM the more rigorous scientific shakeout it needs. In 2019, Roy began the first large-scale clinical trial of RTM, investigating its effectiveness compared with prolonged exposure. He completed it last year. His early data, which he has presented at conferences but aren't published yet, make a compelling case for RTM. In every metric measured, RTM modestly outperformed its competitor: 89 percent of patients completed RTM, compared with a 73 percent completion rate for prolonged exposure; after treatment, nearly 70 percent of RTM patients no longer met the criteria for a PTSD diagnosis, compared with 61 percent of prolonged-exposure patients. RTM treatment required an average of 8.2 sessions versus 8.9, and afterward patients scored lower than prolonged-exposure patients on the PCL-5, a standard measure of PTSD severity. Roy's results aren't nearly as eye-popping as those from Bourke's studies. But they are still impressive. And they carry much more weight. His study comprises more than 100 active or former service members, and unlike the previous studies, it compares RTM head-to-head with an active competitor—'a good step,' Hembree told me. Given Roy's affiliation with the Army and federal funding for his work, Roy's study, which he hopes to publish within a year, may be what it takes to propel RTM into academic relevance. Last fall, I traveled to Boston to line up early outside a Marriott meeting room, hoping to snag a seat in what I assumed would be a packed house. Roy was presenting his completed findings on RTM at the annual International Society for Traumatic Stress Studies conference, the largest gathering of researchers in the field. In 2022, the last time he spoke about RTM to this crowd, the preliminary results from his then-ongoing study were so positive that they caused an uproar from skeptics. Now Roy was back, and I was sure that the crowd would return for more drama. Only they didn't. A sparse crowd listened politely as Roy, who is in his early 60s, took the podium at the end of a fluorescently lit room. His graying curls were offset by his boyish demeanor. With a click, he pulled up his first slide. It featured a quote from the Argentine writer José Narosky: 'In war, there are no unwounded soldiers.' Another slide referenced the study showing that fewer than half of patients complete prolonged-exposure therapy. 'That sucks,' Roy said. Taking on an intervention as unorthodox as RTM risks damaging Roy's academic reputation. But it could also crown his decades-long career in PTSD research. While he was an internal-medicine resident at Walter Reed in the early '90s, war broke out in the Middle East. 'I saw hundreds and hundreds of Gulf War veterans, and it was fairly obvious that PTSD was a huge issue,' Roy told me. The treatment programs he developed incorporated many types of therapy—psychiatric, physical, recreational, art—and are still used at Walter Reed today. But they're far too labor-intensive to scale. 'If we could do that for everybody, that'd be great. But, obviously, that's not too realistic,' Roy said. In his view, to treat the growing number of veterans with PTSD, the standard treatments must evolve. In some ways, RTM is a radical departure from those treatments. Prolonged exposure is based on weakening the link between memories and emotions through the phenomenon of extinction, not actively changing them. Psychologists initially believed that a memory was like wet cement: malleable until it became permanently set, or 'consolidated,' David Riccio, a professor emeritus of psychology at Kent State University, told me. But in the late '60s, researchers showed in animals that old memories could be altered and then stored away in their updated form. Hence, reconsolidation. Reactivating a difficult memory—loosening the cement, so to speak—requires just a fleeting recollection. Because RTM is supposed to work quickly, patients can address multiple traumas during treatment—an important factor for veterans, whose traumas tend to stack up. A therapist in Roy's study told me that RTM patients addressed up to four traumas in 10 sessions. If the data bear out RTM's effects, 'it could end up surpassing those others that are first-line treatments now,' Roy said. That remains a big if. RTM is still novel enough that it could go nowhere. Promising trials are shelved all the time, sometimes for reasons beyond their results. And the Trump administration's massive funding cuts to a Department of Defense–led research-grants program will undoubtedly hamper PTSD research more broadly. Cost, logistics, and financial interests can doom research. So can ideological differences. The basic goal of RTM—remedying PTSD without the pain—conflicts with the prevailing paradigm of trauma treatment. When a person is afraid of elevators, they 'understand implicitly that I need to get into an elevator at some point to get over this,' Barbara Rothbaum, a psychiatry professor at Emory University who has researched prolonged exposure for decades, told me. In this view, RTM is ineffective at best, and, at worst, it's cheating, like merely peeking at the elevator from around a corner down the hall. Recalling a trauma, but backing off before becoming too emotional, could be seen by some exposure experts as avoidance, Hembree said—the very thing that keeps people with PTSD stuck in the past. After a subdued question-and-answer period in the Marriott conference room, the symposium faded to an end. A few attendees milled around outside the room, looking bemused. Birgit Kleim, a scientist from the University of Zurich who studies reconsolidation, laughed when I asked her thoughts on RTM. The data are so good that I 'don't believe it,' she said. Later, she shared a sentiment that is so often meant to strengthen emerging science but can also thwart it: It's promising, but more research is needed. Over sushi in Boston, Roy told me about his history of pursuing unconventional research. Not all of it worked out. A previous idea he studied —treating brain injury with music composed from patients' own brain waves—turned out to be 'garbage,' he said. Research is always a gamble. A fringe idea with real potential could turn out to be groundbreaking, but chances are, it'll be a dud. Roy shrugged: That's just how science goes. The next morning, as I waited in a dark ballroom for one of the keynote addresses of the conference to begin, hundreds of researchers had turned out to hear a discussion on using psychedelics to treat PTSD, itself uncharted territory. Spotlights on an elevated stage illuminated six leaders of PTSD research, imposing against a royal-blue backdrop. Among them was Paula Schnurr, who is widely regarded as the most influential person in the field. Psychedelics were promising because research on new PTSD treatments has 'hit a wall,' Schnurr said. Yet even psychedelics are still combined with old therapies such as prolonged exposure, noted another panelist, Amy Lehrner. 'Are we about developing and studying new options for veterans? Or are we about closing down inquiry and just sticking with what we already have?' Lehrner said. Consider the ' PTSD Clinical Practice Guideline,' a document produced jointly by the Defense Department and the VA that profoundly shapes treatment and research. The most recent version, released in 2023, recommends just three therapies, down from seven in previous iterations. These three options are sometimes disparagingly referred to as 'the trinity': In addition to prolonged exposure, they include cognitive processing therapy and eye-movement desensitization and processing, which are newer treatments. Over the past decade, a number of researchers have denounced the field's reliance on these approaches. RTM's chances of finding a foothold in this landscape are slim. Prolonged exposure was one of the first therapy treatments for PTSD. As such, it is both well studied and widely used despite its drawbacks, Maria Steenkamp, an NYU psychiatry professor who has critiqued the dominance of prolonged exposure, told me. The narrative that it is the best treatment 'took on a life of its own over time,' Steenkamp said. This story has dramatically influenced the field. Most funding for research on new treatments comes from the Department of Defense and the VA, which is currently bracing for the Trump administration to cut more than 80,000 jobs. Under normal circumstances, the VA awards funding on the basis of several factors, including plausibility, preliminary evidence, a sound investigation plan, and the researcher's track record. As a result, well-established treatments have continued to be studied and refined over time. 'The folks who were best positioned to compete for funding were individuals who already had a track record of conducting clinical trials in PE and CBT,' Charles Hoge, a senior scientist at the office of the Army Surgeon General who has criticized the recent 'Clinical Practice Guideline,' told me. As a result, 'relatively small amounts of funding are going into novel treatment approaches.' The field, it seems, is not so much stuck but looped into an ouroboros. Everyone I spoke with told me that Schnurr was the person to ask about the future of new treatments. I was warned that she would be difficult to get an audience with. As the executive director of the National Center for PTSD, she oversees the Clinical Practice Guideline. She ran the study indicating prolonged exposure's 55.8 percent dropout rate that is so often cited by its critics—the finding that Roy said 'sucks.' After weeks of emailing with the VA's press officers, I finally got through to her. She defended prolonged exposure by explaining that even patients who drop out of treatment still reap some of its benefits, and that condensing sessions into a shorter time frame—weeks rather than months—significantly reduces the dropout rate. The VA is constantly seeking new treatments, but it only backs those with a solid evidence base, she said. That's why the list of recommended treatments has been pared down. How might a little-studied but promising therapy such as RTM get the VA's attention? Schnurr's answer was as I expected: More research is needed, preferably not by the treatment developer. If you're a scientist pitching new research to the VA, you have to 'make a good case as to why you think a particular treatment should work, and provide preliminary evidence if you have it,' Miriam Smyth, a director in the VA's research office, told me. Other than Bourke, the only scientists who have studied RTM are Roy and the British group that declined to speak with me; most haven't looked into it. 'My guess would be that they find that other treatments look more promising,' Schnurr said. RTM's fiercest advocates argue that no one with PTSD has time to wait around. Whether or not RTM truly is the treatment they've dreamed of, they're correct about the urgency. After Turner, the Iraq veteran, tried RTM, his flashbacks vanished, but the anger that has coursed through him for two decades has never abated, he told me. Near the end of our interview, his brusque exterior cracked. Through sobs, he said that nobody but a veteran could understand how it feels. He has largely been able to move on from his past, but the damage it caused is always present, walling him off from the rest of the world. 'I just don't think or feel the same,' Turner said. 'And I feel that everywhere.'

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